Hello friends and lovers,
Iran. Iran so far away...
Clearly, I’m not someone to pay a lot of attention to mainstream media. I don’t have television and I obviously spend a lot of time seeking out odd sources of information. That said, I like to listen to radio at night and in the morning and lately all I’m hearing about is the inevitability of a war with Iran.
It’s not quite that clear-cut, but readers who lived through the recent Iraq war will sense a familiar story being told here. Listening to the pundits and the White House in 2012 doesn’t sound much different from the rhetoric we heard before the invasion of Iraq. Is Iran really a nuclear threat or is this another lie to drag the U.S. into another war?
This piece in The New Yorker is one of the best sources I’ve found yet for the full scoop. Here Seymour M. Hersh states:
“…the United States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago––allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state’s military capacities and intentions…”
Clearly I don’t think there was any “mistake” made in the deliberate falsification and exaggeration of information that lead to our recent war in Iraq. That said, this is a strong, informative piece worth the reading:
Iran and the Bomb
Is Iran actively trying to develop nuclear weapons? Members of the Obama Administration often talk as if this were a foregone conclusion, as did their predecessors under George W. Bush. There is a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the United States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago––allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state’s military capacities and intentions. The two most recent National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.s) on Iranian nuclear progress, representing the best judgment of the senior officers from all the major American intelligence agencies, have stated that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003.
Despite years of covert operations inside Iran, extensive satellite imagery, and the recruitment of many Iranian intelligence assets, the United States and its allies, including Israel, have been unable to find irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran, according to intelligence and diplomatic officials here and abroad. One American defense consultant told me that as yet there is “no smoking calutron,” although, like many Western government officials, he is convinced that Iran is intent on becoming a nuclear state sometime in the future.
Read more after jumping over this mushroom cloud…
All of this reminds me of being a little boy in 1979 during the Iran hostage crisis. Vince Vance and the Valiants recorded this parody of The Beach Boys “Barbara Ann” to encourage a patriotic strike against the country.
Stay awake!
Watch this performance of my OccupySong at Occupy Congress in DC!
